Firefox goes Mobile all the way

Mozilla Firefox. Now, I don't really know what that name means to you, but to me, it means something very important: freedom. I remember discovering Firefox back in 2004, freeing me from the claws of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and giving me the choice of using a browser I liked as well as delivering an awesome experience in my old PIII clocked at 600Mhz. Before Firefox, my favorite browser was Netscape, maybe because of its looks, or maybe not, but the fact is, it was the biggest competitor to Microsoft's Internet browser back in the day. Fast forward to the present day, and the browser wars is currently being held between four major competitors: Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox. But, the browser wars is actually old news, isn't it? We're here for the mobile browser wars.

Mobile Browsers

All of the major platforms carry the flag for one browser or another. Right now, what's considered the norm these days is to have a browser based on an open source rendering engine, the WebKit engine. WebKit was the engine designed by Apple for Safari, built on top of the open source Konqueror engine, which forced Apple to make WebKit open source, too. Since we're not here to discuss desktop browsers, we'll keep it on the mobile side: this norm is true for Apple's iOS platform, Google's Android, Palm's webOS, Nokia's S60, and soon RIM's BlackBerry 6. This also applies to the various User Experiences designed on top of Android, such as HTC's Sense, Motorola's MotoBLUR and Samsung's TouchWiz. Even if all these platforms have browsers with WebKit underneath, they're all considered different browsers, and there can be major differences between them, such as performance, UI, plugin support and more. The best example is Google's browser for Android, which incorporates in Android 2.2 (Froyo) the same JavaScript engine which makes Chrome so fast (V8), plus support for Adobe Flash 10.1, two features we know are absent from the rest. 

As time goes, the smartphone market keeps growing, and like in the desktop world, there is a war, although it doesn't receive so much attention, between them to gain market share. But the mobile browser wars is quite different, because there are more players. Adding to the fact that we have so many different browsers shipping, there are other contenders, such as Opera Mini, Opera 10, Dolphin, Steel, Skyfire, and more. But, now comes our favorite browser, and this is about to heat up things a little bit.

Firefox for Mobile, also known as Fennec

Mozilla isn't new to the mobile world. Firefox for Mobile, or Fennec, debuted for Maemo devices like the Nokia 800, 810 or the N900 we looked at a few months ago, and from my perspective, it hasn't gained a lot of traction, probably because the "Internet Tablets" powered by Maemo it has been released for were never conceived as mainstream devices. Still, this 1.0 debut (Fennec was also in development for Windows Mobile but was put on hold) showed Mozilla the way, and made them think about how could they bring Firefox to the mobile industry, not just with the brand, but with the spirit, too. Nowadays Firefox's complaints regard its lack of performance, which was its best feature back in the day when it was released. With every new version, Firefox gets more and more complicated, and even if its speed keeps improving, it just gives us the feeling of being too hard on our computers sometimes. By bringing Firefox down to mobile devices, Mozilla got the chance of re-imagining their browser, and that's exactly what they did.

As you can see, Fennec, in its concept, is a lot more than just a browser with the Firefox brand. Mozilla is focusing Firefox around user experience, tabbed browsing, web standards (HTML5), security, privacy, and what we all love (or hate) about Firefox, customization through add-ons. The concept is as simple as it gets; the navigation bar is the Awesome Bar because, like in desktop Firefox, when you search for something it pulls out your history and tries to help you find where you want to go, plus, of course, it learns your favorite websites with subsequent use. Then we've got the "swiping" concept, where on the left we can switch between our open tabs, and on the right we can go forward/backward and bookmark the site. We know tabbed-browsing can be a bit subjective, since for a lot of people a true tabbed browsing experience in mobile should be similar to Dolphin HD with tabs at the top allowing us to change instantly between them without any other "screen" in between. Otherwise, we could claim tabbed browsing is also supported by Apple's Mobile Safari and Google's browser for Android, among others. Fennec lies somewhere in between these concepts, since it handles tabbed browsing without us going to another screen, but at the same time, the tabs aren't visible while browsing, we need to swipe left. The idea, as we saw in the video, is to hide as much as possible in order to view websites with as much real estate as possible.

However, at the end of the day, none of this is interesting. If Skyfire or Dolphin were to release a new version of their mobile browsers, they'd all see posts announcing it in the most important sites & blogs, without making a difference to end users, because browsing, in the end, is just a matter of preference, or laziness if you will. But Firefox for Mobile is different, because it brings something others don't have, something many have asked Google to add into the stock Android browser; we're talking about Firefox Sync.

As you saw on the video, Firefox Sync is a plugin (in Fennec 2.0 it will be built-in) which allows us to synchronize our bookmarks, history, cookies, passwords and more with an account in the cloud. Essentially, the idea is that we can browse the web from our desktop, laptop or mobile device, and keep all our data synched. This way, if we add a new bookmark from our smartphone, we'll also have it in our desktop browser. Plus, all the searches and sites we visit will be added to our history, allowing us to search for it through the Awesome Bar later, no matter from where we browsed.

By now you should be convinced Firefox Sync is the most powerful asset Mozilla has with Fennec, and for me, it's more than enough reason to switch completely to Fennec in my mobile devices too, since I find a lot of links when I have spare minutes throughout the day. Sure, I can bookmark them in my smartphone and one day, I'll just add them to my desktop browser, but I seriously doubt I'll do that, and I think this happens to most people. Besides, with Twitter, it's incredibly easy to find interesting links, and for me Twitter has no sense outside of a smartphone, so keeping everything synchronized would be really amazing. No more worries about losing an important link.

Where our money's at; Fennec for Android

Finally, we arrive at the best part: a mainstream Mobile version of Firefox, and it couldn't be for any other platform, than Android. Now sadly, Fennec for Android hasn't been released yet, but, since Mozilla's open source, they are allowing any user/developer to contribute by downloading their nightly builds or contributing to the source code, which means we get to see the evolution of Fennec for Android while it's being developed. If you have an Android 2.1 device with an ARM Cortex A8 based System-on-a-Chip, you can grab the most recent build here, but bear in mind it won't update if you install a more recent release later on. You need to uninstall the previous release first. It currently works best for Google's Nexus One and the Motorola Droid.

So, what's it like? We have a nightly build from about more than a month ago, and since the beginning we decided to try it out in our HTC Evo 4G instead of our Nexus One, because if we picked it up it wouldn't be for casual browsing but for a while, allowing to test it more thoroughly. If you want to know our opinion, in one sentence, from this one month-old nightly build, it's this: it's our backup browser. And by backup we mean that when we're in a webpage that doesn't render well in the Evo's stock browser, we try with Fennec, and find out it renders perfectly. I can't give you a better example than this post from the Android Developers Blog:

As you can see, the Android browser in the Evo does not allow us to see the full webpage. By contrast, Fennec, although slower while scrolling, gets us until the end:

I've not been able to replicate this behavior in a stock version of Android 2.1, but it doesn't happen with the stock browser on Android 1.6 nor in my Android 2.2 (FRF91) equipped Nexus One, but I encourage our readers to do so and post in the comments.

So you must be wondering, how is it? Is it slow? Does it crash a lot? Is it safe to install? Are there plugins available already? Well actually, the first question should be, how did this happen? How can Fennec render something the Android WebKit powered browser doesn't? Well, it does render it (I'm convinced), but maybe HTC, while building the browser for Sense UI atop the stock Android 2.1 browser, modified something causing this bug. I've really had no trouble while browsing on the Evo except a couple of exceptions like this one, but one thing I'd like to point out about Fennec is the fact that it uses the same engine as the desktop Firefox, which is called Gecko. And this is good, because it brings more variables into the mobile browser wars, warming up the competition. 

As to how is the experience with the pre-alpha build we've got, I can only say we're actually happy, because even if it's filled with bugs, it renders websites, which is what we wanted to see. Sometimes the Awesome Bar won't want to go to the link we tap, or it won't react to our URL input. In landscape mode, when you type in the Awesome Bar it doesn't show backstrokes, so either you type in carefully, or you count how many times you need to tap on the backspace button. By the way, switching orientations works fine, like the back button on the device, which correctly makes the browser go to the previous site. The back and forward buttons on the right side though don't work sometimes, like the bookmark button. On the left side, we didn't actually use tabs a lot because it wouldn't refresh our current site when switching from tab to tab, so in the end we just avoided that, for now.

But even though the browser renders fine, the hard part about visiting a website with Fennec comes when you want to read something, Pinch and zoom is not enabled in our build (we heard it is in a more recent one), and there aren't any zoom in our out buttons like in the pre 2.x Android browser. So how do you zoom? By double-tapping. (Maemo users, we tried in our build with the volume buttons, too) However, double-tapping is not perfect, and the size at which it zooms in the text depends on where you double-tap; if you do it right, you can read, and if you don't, either you end up with a huge font size or with an extremely tiny one. A trick that helped us a lot was to get the browser into landscape mode, which nearly always allows us to read fine after double-tapping a few times. The hard part was realizing the fastest way to get to another site was to go into portrait mode, type in the URL, and get back into landscape.

And about the best part, plugins, we can't say much, since they were disabled in our nightly build. This has prompted us, for the reasons we stated before, to not use it so much. Besides, installing a newer build requires uninstalling completely the installed one, which means losing all the data Fennec has collected on us thus far. But really, the important part here is that Fennec is available to try out, and that we can't wait to see it improves over the coming months, getting ready for a final release before the end of the year. Expect to read more about Fennec and other Android browsers here.

Firefox Home for iOS

But, that's not all. Something got announced yesterday: Mozilla got an app approved for the App Store, Firefox Home. Essentially, Firefox Home takes the most important part from Fennec (you guessed it, Firefox Sync), and offers it as a standalone iOS application. With Firefox Home you login into your Firefox Sync account and have access to all of your bookmarks, history and more. When you want to see a webpage you have bookmarked or in an open tab in your desktop Firefox (yes, really), it starts the built-in Safari browser to render it, but you can't browse freely. In this way, Mozilla gets their place in the App Store, and Apple doesn't have to say "no, because Fennec is a traditional browser, unlike Opera which just lets Opera's servers do the hard work". I really believe iOS, as a platform, could win a lot by allowing more browsers into the App Store, but that would help other browsers gain market share in the mobile browser wars, plus, it goes against their own rule of "do not replicate the same functionality as our apps". However, I also know most users might not care, and now that they have Firefox Home, I can't really blame them. They have Firefox Sync while we don't, for now.

Closing words

All in all, we just can't say Mozilla isn't trying. They don't want to take the risk of taking Fennec to iOS and see it being rejected, it would be a huge blow to the company. And even if Opera made it, I doubt any other big browser wants to try its own luck, it's a big investment and a big risk. 

Honestly, I really don't expect a lot of performance from Fennec, because that's not why it's important. While Google can make the stock Android browser faster, more compliant with HTML5 and allow developers to access the device's hardware through web-technologies (which I respect), Mozilla is, on the other hand, bringing Firefox down to our smartphones with one idea in mind: extending our lives. Whether it's mobile first or desktop first, that's up to the user, but what's important is to have all the data synched with the cloud, allowing users to extend their browsing experience anywhere without losing any data. But no matter how you understand both Google's and Mozilla's approach, what's clear is that we, Android users, win. And that's the important part.

Fennec picture was gathered from flickr.com